1. column
I, as a programmer, do not mind those nastily formatted tabular data, like...
Pid Name %CPU1230 Firefox 15600 Code 12809 Terminal 1.2But when I learnt about column, I was pretty fascinated by how easy it is to make it neat!
column <file_name> -tPid Name %CPU1230 Firefox 15600 Code 12809 Terminal 1.22. less
How many times did you feel disgusted by the mess you made on your terminal screen? Maybe you printed a huge file or did ps aux. I have been there.
A very neat solution is to use less. The text is displayed upon applying a filter for paging through text one screenful at a time.
You don't have any clutter on your terminal once you exit less.
3. sort
Imagine having a file with ID and Names like this.
16 Siri20 Cortana13 Mithil9 JarvisA quick sort on the IDs would be super helpful right?
sort <file_name> -n9 Jarvis13 Mithil16 Siri20 Cortana4. tr
I can't really think of a better situation to use this right now, but hey it works.
Say you have to replace the occurence of a character. tr (translate) does this for you.
echo "This is a sentence" | tr " " "\n"Thisisasentence5. head and tail
Head and tail themselves are pretty solid tools, but together they have their own use case.
Say you want the 11th line in a text file. You can do this by :
head <file_name> -n 11 | tail -n 1That was all for this post. What are your preferred helpful Unix tools?
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Top comments(5)
- LocationSwansea, UK
- WorkSenior Developer
- Joined
I'm a huge fan of the (relatively) straight forwardfind command. When coupled with-exec, you can do some pretty creative things, fairly quickly.
I've usedfind historically for getting backup files which are more than 2 weeks old, and deleting them. It's a simple way of keeping backups from taking over hard drive space, without needing to do everything manually
That coupling withexec takes it to another level. What are your other favourites?
- LocationSwansea, UK
- WorkSenior Developer
- Joined
Going to be boring and saygrep. I think a lot of people have it as a go-to tool to filter the returned output of a command into something useful.
I don't spend a lot of time in the terminal using Linux/Unix specific commands. Most of my time on the terminal is spend using Git, and increasingly more often, redis-cli
- LocationAmherst, NY, USA
- WorkSoftware Engineer at JPmicrosystems DBA
- Joined
I don't use tr very often, but it's very handy for getting rid of odd binary codes in text files and translating between upper and lower case. I have seen much fancier uses of it, but don't recall any at the moment.
Here's a quick way to show someone the format of a data file without revealing any sensitive data.
#!/bin/bash## Obsfucate a text file## 11/25/2013## Thanks to D. Joe on the WNYLUG list## For sharing the format of a text file with sensitive data in itif [ -z "${1}" ]then IN="/dev/stdin"else if [ ! -r "${1}" ] then echo "Can't read [${1}]" exit 1 fi IN="${1}"fiif [ -z "${2}" ]then OUT="/dev/stdout"else OUT="${2}"fitr 'a-z' 'A-Z' < "${IN}" | tr 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA' | tr '0123456789' '9999999999' > "${OUT}"For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/orreporting abuse
